4 Answers
4

Over the past decade, Apple's iTunes has slowly developed into a very resource-heavy application, and by default Apple provides the 32-bit version of their product regardless of whether you're using a 32-bit or 64-bit Operating System.

I find that the 64-bit version of iTunes seems to work more efficiently on 64-bit Operating Systems like the one you're using.

Once you've downloaded and installed the 64-bit version of iTunes, be sure to check for updates as soon as you can so that you can get this updated as well (the updates will also bring in the 64-bit versions).

Using Resource Monitor I noticed that iTunes was spending up to a minute reading from c:\Users\Your Username\iTunes\Temp File *.tmp so I deleted all those temp files, plus the temp directory in c:\Users\Your Username\iTunes\temp (that was 130MB on my machine)

Now iTunes starts almost instantly and uses almost no CPU time while running.

I suspect iTunes creates these temp files upgrading the iTunes library during upgrades, and often gets stuck in a loop reading it.

iTunes is very disk heavy program. On my system it's always the most disk intensive app when it's running. I always find it handy to use Resource Monitor to analyse what a slow program is doing. Nine times out of ten it's thrashing the disk.